The important thing for Amazon to focus on is the core item - books - and not the hardware device. As Om Malik points out, Amazon gets paid whether you use a Kindle or not, so long as you buy from their store:

The day I first laid hands on Apple’s iPad I banished my Amazon Kindle to the back of the proverbial drawer. And yet, I have been spending, on average, about $10 every 3-5 days on Amazon’s site buying a book to read using the Kindle application on the iPad. In fact, the reading experience on the iPad is so superior to that of the Kindle I often find myself staying up later than usual reading a book.

Some companies would have doubled down on the hardware, but Amazon was smart - they pushed the reader app out to iPhones (and now iPads) - they don't care what device you read on, so long as it was purchased from them. My wife's experience mirrors Malik's, except that she didn't bother with the Kindle in the first place.

Since the Kindle app exists on iPhones, iPads, PCs, and Android devices, stuff you buy there is portable. Anything you buy in the iBook store, on the other hand, is locked to the Apple device. Amazon is playing this very intelligently.

Today's Smalltalk Daily looks at a simple runtime scripting example. I've covered this topic before, but used the (more complex) BottomFeeder application as my example. Here, we take a simple "application" (a class with one method) and a simple subsystem to start it - along with the script to do the build. The script is reproduced below; if you would rather just watch the video, then just go here. I posted all of the code and steps for this yesterday if you would rather take this in textual post form. You can download the example code here.

Doc Searls has been talking about the limitations of "personal branding" for awhile now - this morning he linked to two people on the subject. The "manifesto" post by Maureen Johnson is the one that caught my eye - her message about "social media experts" is something I'm familiar with.

I don't know that I've given the "personal brand" thing a lot of thought over the years. I avoid some subjects on my blogs (partisan politics), simply to avoid having disagreements over things I'd rather not talk about in this particular forum.

I think the big divide in this area is between normal people and the advocates who spend all of their time telling you to "promote your personal brand". You know what? This isn't really that complicated. Write about what you're interested in. Even if - like me - what you're interested in crosses over into commercial promotion, that doesn't mean that you have to become a mindless shill. Listen to our podcast for awhile, and you'll see that Michael and I haven't been shy about noting various flaws in Cincom Smalltalk. We love the product, but we know where the bodies are buried, too. Lots of promoters like to pretend that their favored product/solution/brand has no flaws - that way lies the "mindless shill" tag.

Ultimately, you want to come off as believable. There are going to be plenty of people who disagree with you, and that's fine - no one has a monoploy on truth, or even on a better point of view. The best you can do is to have people realize that you stand behind your words.

I received a question about creating a runtime image via my chatback widget this morning - I've done screencasts on that, but those use BottomFeeder as an example. While that's a real example, it's also fairly large, and somewhat complex. So - I thought a very simple example might be useful.

First, I created a new package, and then a new class (subclassed from Object) with no instance variables.

So that the results are clear, I ran the application in headless mode - the Transcript write drops to a file called 'headless-transcript.log' (that's configurable, but never mind). Next, I need a way to have this application startup. I created a new class:

I saved the code I created to a parcel, so that I could do a clean load. On my Mac, the command line looked like this (I have a symlink from visual to where the VM actually resides):

./visual visual.im -filein sampleDeploy.st

Where 'sampleDeploy.st' is the script above. Running that drops a single line to 'headless-transcript.log' and quits, just as you would expect. You can copy the script from above, and download the example parcel here.

There are plenty of pragmatic reasons to avoid Flash right now - using a more neutral format gets you on the iPhone and iPad, while not leaving you off Android and PCs. However, it also looks like there might be more tangible benefits - witness Scribd:

Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months

This week's podcast features Juan Vuletich and Jecel Assumpcao, two of the members of the Squeak Oversight Board. This is part 2 of two - if you want to hear part 1 first, download that here. This is our second talk with member sof the SOB; we plan to do regular updates with them over time.

To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.

To listen immediately, use the player below:

If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Effortless for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!

The saga continues. A reader forwarded us this note he got from AT&T, simply stating that his iPhone 4 preorder had been cancelled, for no apparent reason. And he's not the only one.

Follow the link for an image showing the cancellation notice. There are a few hard foreign policy issues about which it's common to say (about one party or the other) that "they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity". Well, when it comes to having positive PR, that pretty much defines AT&T. IT's as if they see the possibility, and run. Fast.

My daughter got me Alan Wake
for Father's Day - I started playing it late last night. It's an interesting game - a lot like an episodic TV series with a game component added on. The only complaint I have so far is the controller actions - what on earth were they thinking when they made the "B" button the action one? That's contrary to every other game I've played :)

I have to admit, it does a good job of setting the atmospherics though. It sort of freaked my daughter and I out when a light blew out in the room while we were playing :) If you don't get that - light (or its absence) plays a big role in the game. Your flashlight seems to be the best weapon (at least so far; I'm not very far in).

Phishing isn’t (just) about finding a person who is technically naive. It’s about attacking the seemingly impregnable defenses of the technically sophisticated until you find a single, incredibly unlikely, short-lived crack in the wall.

To be honest, I'm surprised that Doctorow got tripped up by the "Is this you" Twitter/Facebook thing though - that's a pretty well known attack. On the other hand, we all click on stuff without thinking too deeply about it, and url shorteners are a very useful attack vector.

It looks as if publishers might really be lobbying for obtaining a new exclusive right conferring the power to monopolise speech e.g. by assigning a right to re-use a particular wording in the headline of a news article anywhere else without the permission of the rights holder.

I can see it now - the literary police swooping in and shutting down a blog for malicious reuse of a sentence. If sentences can be copyrighted, are there any limits at all? The only "positive" from this is that it reassures me that North America does not have a monopoly on stupidity with respect to copyright law....

I finished a second run through of Mass Effect 2 last night; now I'm looking for a new plot driven game to get. Any suggestions? Alan Wake looks interesting, but I'd love to hear from anyone who's actually played it.

The company has previously announced the Windows Phone 7 OS for smartphones. Microsoft's focus on consumer mobile devices will continue through the Windows Phone brand, Kelley said. It's unclear if the Windows Embedded Handheld announcement means that Windows Phone 7 will not support enterprise capabilities originally promised for that OS, or if Windows Embedded Handheld and Windows Phone 7 will compete with each other for business users.

It's becoming clear to me, at least, that the rot at MS starts at the top. Ballmer is a sales guy with no grasp of what his company does, or of where the industry is headed. He needs to go - and whoever they replace him with should start by radically downsizing the company. If it's big enough to come out with this kind of confusion, it's too big.

I did a screencast on the mini-aggregator code recently - it allows you to specify a set of feeds (possibly with content filters), and push out an output set of links. I thought it might be nice to actually start using that - so over on the sidebar, you'll notice a new section titled "Related". Under that I have a set of the most recent (only 1 deep) posts from some of the Smalltalk blogs I read. It auto-updates via cron every fifteen minutes, so it should stay current.

Patrick McKenzie explains why everything you think you know (as a software developer) about names (personal names, not variables) is wrong. While email addresses don't share all of those problems, it's not safe to assume that everyone who goes into your system will have one...

I can choose to place an ad in the New York Times if my target is nationwide or in my town’s paper if it is locally relevant. I can direct (control) who sees my ad. The folks following me on Twitter are from all over the world. As far as I know, there isn’t a simple way to reach only the those in a particular market. Nor do I currently have a strong enough local base of followers. I would need to find someone else local with a bunch of followers and hope they’d re-tweet for me.

The targeting thing is only partly correct. Why? Well, what are the circulation numbers? What's the demographic uptake? At least in the US, the readership for printed news drops through the floor the lower the age bracket gets.

The better question is, would traditional ads do you much good anyway? I still think most advertising is a shared fiction, where the buyers and sellers agree to pretend that something useful is happening.

Unfortunately, there were flaws and vagueness in the Interphone study, starting with the fact that it was based on cell phone use six years ago and out of date compared to today's 3G-class phones. This enabled the CTIA to cite it as evidence that cell phones were not a definitive factor in cases of brain cancer.

Then we had 2G digital for a bit (still do), and 3G, while mature, is still rolling out. 4G (LTE) is right around the corner. Nothing has been in the field long enough for a longitudinal study to yield useful numbers. Even if 3G and LTE settle down and stick for awhile, you'll still have to wait for years before there's enough data. As I was saying on a different topic yesterday, we just don't know what we don't know...

But for the past two years, the sunspots have mostly been missing. Their absence, the most prolonged for nearly a hundred years, has taken even seasoned sun watchers by surprise. "This is solar behaviour we haven't seen in living memory," says David Hathaway, a physicist at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

The thinking had been that after the (somewhat prolonged) solar minimum, sunspots (and solar storms, which could cause grief for power systems on earth) would be back with a vengeance. However, they aren't, and no one seems to understand why. This part is what should give people pause:

Even with the solar cycle finally under way again, the number of sunspots has so far been well below expectations. Something appears to have changed inside the sun, something the models did not predict. But what?

Models are useful, but they depend on data - the more data, the better the model tends to be. What if you only have partial data? Or worse, what if you aren't even sure what data you still need? In fields like this - solar weather - the models obviously need more data before they can be fully accurate. That's not anyone's fault; it's not as if we know how to send a probe into the sun and have it transmit data. It should give us pause about any scientific field that relies too heavily on models that are derived from partial data though...

I'm a big fan of only adding scaling to a system when you need it - but there are times when you know that you are going to need it. Like, say, yesterday, with the Apple/At&T iPhone pre-ordering system:

They're just using some web interface, not the exact same customers are using online, but not much better. It's probably the same servers. Basically, they were getting one pre-order thru every 20 minutes. They said the problem was system wide. Here's how it worked: They just kept mashing on the 'submit' button and getting error after error. On the umpteenth try, it'd go through and then the next step, whatever that was, would get error after error. After a long time, it would finally go through. What's worse is that the first step of the process reups your 2 year contract, so you can't walk away if you get fed up. I had to stick around until it went through, or i'd have a new contract but no subsidized phone.

I ran into that myself - and the error message from the Apple site probably confused some people. The site told me that there was an error at the point where I entered my Apple ID. That made me wonder, so I pulled out my existing iPhone and asked it to update a bunch of apps - just to get prompted for my password. I hadn't entered anything wrong; it was just the servers having problems.

This isn't a new thing, either - you would think that Apple and A&T would be ready for this by now.

As the iPhone 4 preorder disaster worsens by the minute, the blame looks to fall squarely on AT&T's shoulders as we learn more about what went wrong. The most damaging of these may be an source close to the carrier which now claims the system which AT&T was not tested before the launch.

From May 2009 to May 2010, Quantcast finds, Apple's share of the mobile market slipped 8.1 percent. In that same time span, Android's market share jumped up by 12.2 percent. And remember: These numbers don't even take into account the HTC Droid Incredible or HTC EVO 4G, both of which have been selling like hotcakes, nor do they factor in piqued interest in older Android phones thanks to Google's new Android 2.2 upgrade.

There are significant differences though - Apple has the app store and a lot of good apps; the Android app situation is progressing, but it's not the same seamless experience - yet. I don't know that it's a sure bet that history will repeat, but if Apple doesn't pay attention - over the air updates, easing up on some of the sillier app store rules - they may paint themselves into a corner they can't escape from.

France enacted a "three strikes" law for digital copyright violations, so one of the ISPs there started offering a service (2 euros a month) to sit on user PCs (Windows only) and monitor for p2p activity. That's when the stupid started to pile up. The application periodically pings a server for updates - people looking into it found out that it's a Java servlet listening. However:

Nothing too out of the ordinary there except that all information is not only being transmitted in the clear but all information on that server is public (via http://195.146.235.67/status), meaning that every user had their IP addresses exposed to the public. But it doesn’t stop there.

It gets worse - hackers can apparently use the client apps to inject malware onto end user systems. This is what happens when you decide to solve a "problem" (p2p copyright violations) with complex "solutions".

That server doesn't seem to be accessible anymore, but go ahead and read the story - it's just too funny in a pathetic kind of way.

Bert Freudenberg has Etoys (in Squeak) ported to the iPad. Whether it ever makes it past the app store hurdles in front of it probably depends on what happens with Scratch. I embedded Bert's YouTube video below: